Sunday, February 13, 2011

Response to Rebekah Higgitt's "'Astrology is Rubbish,' but..." Blog

While it is good to see an effort made to put the astronomical arguments against astrology put to rest, because they have no basis, there are still many people who wish to claim that astrology is rubbish on other grounds. You yourself still want to make this assertion, but how closely have you examined those supposed other grounds? There is a body of evidence that research of astrology, when it is conducted fairly and uses methods to carefully weigh the data by rank or ratings, has shown scientific evidence in support of astrology.

Those experiments that did not use rankings or ratings, do not find evidence of astrology, but those that did use these methods (and there are a number of them) have found scientific support.

An outstanding example of this is one that you alluded to earlier, the controversial Shawn Carlson double-blind experiment, published in 1985 in Nature, which has actually been reversed in favor of astrology.

For many years, this study was held up as the definitive test against astrology. However, a detailed assessment of this study published in 2009 by Professor Suitbert Ertel is forcing scientists to rethink their claims against astrology. The flaws in the Carlson study are very tricky to find, making one wonder if they are not intentional. These flaws are so serious that they distort the actual findings, which support the claims of the astrologers. Once the flaws are pointed out, this is easy for anyone to see.